The 'Millenials' have it

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It doesn’t matter what you call them (‘Millenials’, ‘Generation Y’, ‘Gen Y’, or the ‘Net Generation’), students of today are very different. Born between 1975 and 1995 this new bread of students are better equipped emotionally and technically to understand the possibilities of the Internet, yet we need to be able to (initially) guide them.

‘Generation Y’ are intimate users (and abusers) of technology and take it’s availability and capability for granted, without a true appreciation of how ‘we’ arrived at the current state of being. In the 2007 book, Connecting to the Net.Generation: What Higher Education Professionals Need to Know About Today’s Students, the authors found that in a survey of 7,705 college students in the US

  • 97% own a computer
  • 97% have, at one point in time, downloaded music and other media
  • 94% own a mobile phone
  • 76% use instant messaging and social networking sites
  • 75% of students have a Facebook profile, and most of them check it daily
  • 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device, such as an iPod
  • 49% regularly download music and other media
  • 34% use the Internet as their primary source of news
  • 28% author a blog, and 44% read blogs
  • 15% of Instant Messaging users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
  • 14% use online purchasing to buy tobacco related products
  • 8% have confessed to having an online gaming addiction at some point in their life

    • This is a very different world they are living in, but they still look to some form of authority to begin the journey (even if they shortly disregard this authority as having any relevance, and favour peer guidance and self-discovery from here on in).

    Generation Y is a marketers wet dream, they have all the knowledge available through the Internet, they (often) have a disposable income, and are very sensitive to brand awareness and brand association. They pick up on new and innovative brands and treat it as ‘cool’. As soon as something becomes ‘cool’ to society they drop it as being ‘un-cool’, and go looking for the newest, biggest rising star … so starts the process over again.

    In reference to the Baby Boomer generation of the 1970’s, Business Week says of Generation Y:

    “This generation is more racially diverse: One in three is not Caucasian. One in four lives in a single-parent household. Three in four have working mothers. While boomers are still mastering Microsoft Windows 98, their kids are tapping away at computers in nursery school.”

    … to be continued.